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Scientists find fossil from THE DAY the dinosaurs died 66m years ago: Leg of Thescelosaurus was 'ripped off in aftermath' of huge asteroid strike that wiped out most species on Earth Dinosaurs were wiped out by the Chicxulub event - a plummeting asteroid that hit Earth 66 million years ago The asteroid more than six miles in diameter slammed into what is now Mexico, leaving a 93-mile wide crater Experts found the fossilised leg of a dinosaur killed and what appears to be a fragment of the asteroid itself Findings were made at Tanis, a renowned paleontological site in North...

The limb, complete with skin, is just one of a series of remarkable finds emerging from the Tanis fossil site in the US State of North Dakota. But it's not just their exquisite condition that's turning heads - it's what these ancient specimens purport to represent. The claim is the Tanis creatures were killed and entombed on the actual day a giant asteroid struck Earth. The day 66 million years ago when the reign of the dinosaurs ended and the rise of mammals began. The BBC has spent three years filming at Tanis for a show to be broadcast on...

More than 30 million years ago, the Peruvian sea was home to one of the largest predators to ever emerge in the ocean. Its colossal size has surprised the scientific community.Species endangered by this fearsome marine animal that remained hidden in the Peruvian sea. In 2021, one of the most important discoveries ever recorded in the country was announced. It was only at the beginning of 2022 that the first assessments of the skeletal remains of Peru's so-called 'sea monster', an ancient whale considered one of the largest predators that existed 36 million years ago, were reported. Its impressive size...

The fossilised remains of the animal were discovered in what is now Montana back in 1988 but it has only been identified as a new species of vampyropod now. This group of soft-bodied cephalopods was previously believed to have eight arms, but the new species actually has 10. 'This is the first and only known vampyropod to possess 10 functional appendages,' said Dr Whalen. During their new analysis of the fossil, the researchers found that the species had 10 arms with suckers, and dated back 328 million years – 82 million years older than the previous earliest record. 'The arm...

Credit: skeleton by Maurício Silva Garcia; photo and composition by Rodrigo Temp MüllerPaleontologists from the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (UFSM) published a study in the scientific periodic Gondwana Research describing the new fossilized specimen.The oldest dinosaurs have been excavated from fossiliferous layers with approximately 233 million years from Brazil and Argentina. Furthermore, some older Argentinean deposits revealed remains of dinosaur precursors, which provide crucial data on the origin of "true" dinosaurs. These creatures lived approximately 236 million years ago and were small, with no more than 1 meter in length.Whereas the fossil record of dinosaur precursors is relatively...

Giant, spike-toothed salmon that weighed almost 400 lbs. once made their home in the ancient coastal waters of the Pacific Ocean, according to new research. The now-extinct salmon species spawned in California rivers approximately 11 million to 5 million years ago, the scientists said. The fish measured up to 9 feet long, with spike-like teeth that were more than 1 inch long. Though its dagger-like teeth could have been deadly for prey, the ancient salmon was probably a filter feeder rather than a predatory species, meaning the fish took in water full of plankton as it swam, as modern Pacific...

We’ve long known a disaster took place about 66 million years ago, where in a geological instant, 75% of the plants and animals on Earth were wiped out, including all the land-roaming dinosaurs. But here’s a new detail about that event: Even though we can’t pinpoint exactly what year this disaster took place, we now know it happened during the springtime. Most scientists agree the disaster was an asteroid impact, where an asteroid at least 10 kilometers wide struck the Chicxulub region in the present-day Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. The impact released 2 million times more energy than the most...

A group of paleontologists discovered a large, well-preserved pterosaur on a rocky beach off the coast of Scotland. Boasting roughly an 8-foot wingspan, the ancient reptile is the largest of its kind to be found from the Jurassic Period. The animal’s existence was a chance find made in 2017, when paleontologist Amelia Penney stumbled across the creature’s head while photographing dinosaur footprints on a rocky beach on the Isle of Skye. The pterosaur was promptly sawed out of the rock (with a couple pauses to deal with the tides, which threatened to wash away the fossil) and exhaustively studied; the...

Creatures get trapped in amber all the time, but most prehistoric finds are insects. Amber is a great material for preserving arthropods because of their already tough shells that will hold on even if the insides disintegrate. But what about a lizard? Retinosaurus hkamentiensis is a new extinct species of lizard that was unexpectedly found trapped in Burmese amber. No one expected an entire reptile to be preserved so well, from its scaly skin down to its skeleton.

A long-necked dinosaur that roamed present-day Montana 150 million years ago likely suffered from a respiratory infection, according to a study published in Scientific Reports on Thursday, the first evidence of a respiratory infection in dinosaurs which experts believe could have caused flu-like symptoms including coughing and fever

Palaeontologists are claiming Utah officials have driven over a precious fossil site after dismantling a boardwalk nearby, possibly irreparably damaging preserved dinosaur footprints and animal tracks. These ancient remnants are extremely delicate and cannot be easily seen, according to sources speaking to Gizmodo, but contain more than 200 dinosaur tracks left by 10 distinct species. The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) has since filed a cease-and-desist letter against the US Bureau of Land Management Utah office, calling for the immediate halt of the destruction of Mill Canyon Dinosaur Tracksite near Moab. The alleged destruction comes as a result of the...

Richard Leakey, the world-renowned paleoanthropologist-turned-conservationist, has died at 77. The death of the native Kenyan was announced late Sunday by Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta. A cause of death was not given. Leakey, whose famous parents, Louis and Mary Leakey, made profound contributions to the understanding of human evolution through key fossil finds of early hominids, also made important discoveries of his own in the field. In 1981, he gained public notoriety as the presenter in a BBC television series called The Making of Mankind. By the late 1980s, however, he had shifted his focus, stepping in as head of the...

The Hallucigenia sparsa. (Caron et al., Proc. Royal Soc. B, 2013) We sort of take for granted the depictions of prehistoric beasties illustrated in the books of our childhood. But piecing together Earth's murky past is a lot harder than it sounds. Scientists have to rely on fragmentary bones, weathered footprints, impressions in rock – these don't always capture the fine details of the complex, living, breathing animal that passed through or died there. Sometimes, while doing this painstaking work, researchers get it wrong. And not just a little wrong! Here are some of our favorite fossil flubs, and what...

The largest-ever fossil of a giant millipede—as big as a car—has been found on a beach in the north of England. The fossil—the remains of a creature called Arthropleura—dates from the Carboniferous Period, about 326 million years ago, over 100 million years before the Age of Dinosaurs. The fossil reveals that Arthropleura was the largest-known invertebrate animal of all time, larger than the ancient sea scorpions that were the previous record holders. The specimen, found on a Northumberland beach about 40 miles north of Newcastle, is made up of multiple articulated exoskeleton segments, broadly similar in form to modern millipedes....

Researchers from the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) have identified the remains of a mammoth in the town of Los Reyes de Juárez, Mexico.The mammoth was uncovered in one of the towns municipal cemeteries whilst workers were preparing new graves.Upon further inspection, biologist Iván Alarcón Durán identified that they were the bones of megafauna from the Pleistocene, with initial studies suggesting the remains are an elderly male Columbian mammoth.The Columbian mammoth (mammuthus columbi) inhabited North America as far north as the northern United States and as far south as Costa Rica during the Pleistocene epoch. DNA studies shows...

Meet Henry, the dinosaur that will go to auction during the prestigious sale of Modern and Contemporary Art at Cambi on December 14 in Milan, Italy. Henry is a Hypacrosaurus skeleton, an ornithopod dinosaur belonging to the hadrosaurid family, dating back to the Upper Cretaceous, Campanian era (75-67 million years ago). Due to the more moderate size of its skeleton compared to Tyrannosaurus, its name means "near the highest lizard" and is distinguished by the high curve of its spine and the characteristic shape of the tall and rounded crest. Henry measures 13 feet long and was collected in a...

Researchers with Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) found and extracted a mammoth tusk deep under the ocean. According to MBARI, their team spotted the tusk 185 miles offshore and 10,000 feet deep on top of a seamount in 2019. They returned on July 2021 to bring the tusk to the surface. "The researchers have confirmed that the tusk—about one meter (just over three feet) in length—is from a Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi)," reported the institute. They believe it could be the oldest well-preserved mammoth tusk recovered from this area of North America. The Columbian mammoth went extinct around 11,500...

Picture Antarctica today and what comes to mind? Large ice floes bobbing in the Southern Ocean? Maybe a remote outpost populated with scientists from around the world? Or perhaps colonies of penguins puttering amid vast open tracts of snow? Fossils from Seymour Island, just off the Antarctic Peninsula, are painting a very different picture of what Antarctica looked like 40 to 50 million years ago – a time when the ecosystem was lusher and more diverse. Fossils of frogs and plants such as ferns and conifers indicate Seymour Island was much warmer and less icy, while fossil remains from marsupials...

An approximately 300 million-year-old fossil skeleton discovered at Canyonlands National Park in Utah could be the first of its kind, researchers say. © Adam Marsh/National Park Service The fossil discovery at Canyonlands National Park was a rare intact skeleton. The exact species and classification have yet to be determined, but the fossil is a tetrapod -- meaning animal with four legs -- and could be an early ancestor of either reptiles or mammals. Paleontologists have determined the fossil could be anywhere from 295 million to 305 million years old, between the Pennsylvanian and the Permian geologic time periods.

Life reconstruction of herbivorous dinosaurs based on 220-million-year-old fossil footprints from Ipswich, Queensland, Australia. Credit: Anthony Romilio ========================================================================================= “Raptor-like” dinosaur discovered in an Australian mine, actually uncovered as a timid vegetarian. 50-year-old findings of the Triassic period’s “largest meat-eating dinosaur” reanalyzed as the long-necked herbivore Prosauropod. Fossil footprints found in an Australian coal mine around 50 years ago have long been thought to be that of a large ‘raptor-like’ predatory dinosaur, but scientists have in fact discovered they were instead left by a timid long-necked herbivore. University of Queensland paleontologist Dr. Anthony Romilio recently led an international team to re-analyze...